Want to come for a walk? Amble through wet meadows and woods where even the air takes on a green sheen?

Hawthorne, elderberry and ash trees

Where the sun has halos in those 5 minutes it agrees to come out of the clouds, before the showers return?

I walked along the Columbia river on Sauvie Island, so high with all the precipitation that the trees on the shores were submerged.

I approached the Willamette slough, where the pelicans rested until a fledging eagle chased them, descending from the perch where s/he had hung out with the parents.

I spotted yellow – the gold finches,

the yellow warblers,

and the Western Tanagers, not shy at all and in remarkable numbers.

It made me think of numbers, and how they have to be seen in context.

In this week you likely saw the announcement of the horrific milestone that the US had now suffered, one million deaths. Perhaps you didn’t see the reports, that by some estimates 300.000 of this people would likely have survived if they had been vaccinated. The anti-vaxx movement, of course, is fueled by many influences, but one influence seems to be underemphasized.

Rufus Towhee

There is a classic statement by CP Snow, still relevant now.

“A good many times I have been present at gathering of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold, it was also negative. Yet I was asking something that is the scientific equivalent of: have you read a work of Shakespeare’s? I now believe that if I had asked an even simpler question – such as, what do you mean by mass, or acceleration, which is the scientific equivalent of saying, can you read? – not more than one in ten of the highly educated would have felt that I was speaking the same language.”

Snow’s concern was not specifically with scientific illiteracy. Instead, the concern was that people find it genuinely acceptable, and in some circles a point of pride, to have no understanding of science or math. Many times, I have heard people say with defiance: I don’t do math.”

The problem here is not ignorance about differential equations. The problem is revealed when we look at examples in which extraordinarily simple mathematical concepts change enormously how you think about central issues.

Pink Hawthorne

As an example, why are people not taking Covid seriously? Let us imagine, that the one million who died had a social circle of 30 people each. That means 30 million Americans have had direct contact with a Covid death. But now consider that approximately 85 million people have been infected in the US. If each of those has a circle of 30, then the vast majority of the country does know someone (or many) directly who did ok, but does not know anyone directly who died. Is it any wonder then, that vast numbers of Americans buy crazy claims like this is just a strong version of the flu — because that is the pattern of their lived experience, which outweighs dry numbers any old time.

Two Daddy Longlegs making more Daddy Longlegs

Totally different example: In the Pacific NW the Northern spotted owl may well go extinct. The most recent threat is from competition with a different species of owl, the barred owl. In a desperate response, the government has been killing barred owls in specified regions to open territory for the Northern spotted. So far, it looks like killing 2400 barred owls across ten years allowed the Northern spotted owls in those territories to survive. In places where the barred owls were left alone, the Northern spotted experienced serious decline, increasing the danger of complete extinction. You may still find this preservation strategy unacceptable, but, when you ask about costs and benefits, you might take into account that the barred owl is extremely common and thriving. The Northern spotted owl could be wiped out. So would you be willing to sacrifice, let’s say, 2% of one species in order to gain, let’s say, a 20 or 30% increase in another? These are not the real numbers, and the research is not clear yet on what the absolute numbers are. But surely the question takes on a different coloration if you look at the number of owls in the denominator.

Vultures were out en masse

One more example with a very simple character: many jurisdictions have just gone through elections, and a prominent argument from the right is that we need to do more to combat the crime wave that is ongoing in our country. The evidence for this crime wave is visible to anyone who even glances at the headlines. The problem, however, is that this is a ridiculous way to gauge crime rates. Recent data confirm that crime rates in Oregon have actually gone down (however minimally), rather than up for the last interval tested (2020.)

If we are trying to persuade people to take Covid seriously, we need to be aware of their lived experience, and that understanding has to be shaped by simple calculations I have sketched here. We may disagree about owl protection policies, but in thinking it through we have to be alert to proportions, rather than raw numbers, and in thinking about crime rates, our votes and our tax $$ should be guided by real numbers, not scare stories. Since people proudly say “I don’t care about numbers,” they rely instead on short cuts that routinely give them answers miles off of what they’d get if they spent 2 minutes thinking about the numbers. It won’t end well.

My walk ended with the resident scrub jay, who always hangs out around the parking lot. So did a ranger from the park service or whatever official administrative body. Talk about numbers in context: they had found a single gypsy moth threat in 2020 on the island, none last year. Here she was spending a full day hanging dozens of traps for these pests on the trees, and that was just the beginning. If you can’t control the moths when you still have a chance with small populations, the trees are doomed. Wish the CDC acted the same…

Expect to see small green bags dotting the island. Likely too many to count.

I am taking next week off to have some down time. See you soon after that. You can count the days!

Music is by Bartok today – he included math, in particular expressions of the Fibonacci numbers, in many of his sonatas.